National Birds of the World
National Birds of the World

Author: Ron Toft

Publisher: Bloomsbury Natural History

Published: 2014-12-16

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781408178355

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Birds are one of the most popular and visible forms of all wildlife and are inextricably linked with the development of human cultures all around the world. Over the years some of the most eye-catching species of bird have been officially or unofficially adopted by countries as symbols of their national identity; there are now almost 100 national birds spanning every imaginable group from condors to parrots, trogons to frigatebirds. Both a comprehensive listing and guide book, National BIrds provides a range of information from species data to how these birds have been used and abused through the ages. It recounts tales of how they came to be adopted and presents a wide range of official and cultural contexts where they appear from feathers in tribal costumes to stamps and currency.

The Good Lord Bird (National Book Award Winner)
The Good Lord Bird (National Book Award Winner)

Author: James McBride

Publisher: Riverhead Books

Published: 2013-08-20

Total Pages: 434

ISBN-13: 1594486344

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Henry Shackleford is a young slave living in the Kansas Territory in 1857, the region a battlefield between anti and pro slavery forces. When John Brown, the legendary abolitionist, arrives in the area, an arguement between Brown and Henry's master quickly turns violent. Henry is forced to leave town with Brown, who believes Henry is a girl. Over the next months, Henry conceals his true identity as he struggles to stay alive. He finds himeself with Brown at the historic raid on Harper's Ferry, one of the catalysts for the civil war.

All the Birds, Singing
All the Birds, Singing

Author: Evie Wyld

Publisher: Pantheon

Published: 2014-04-15

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 0307907775

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

From one of Granta’s Best Young British Novelists, a stunningly insightful, emotionally powerful new novel about an outsider haunted by an inescapable past: a story of loneliness and survival, guilt and loss, and the power of forgiveness. Jake Whyte is living on her own in an old farmhouse on a craggy British island, a place of ceaseless rain and battering wind. Her disobedient collie, Dog, and a flock of sheep are her sole companions, which is how she wants it to be. But every few nights something—or someone—picks off one of the sheep and sounds a new deep pulse of terror. There are foxes in the woods, a strange boy and a strange man, and rumors of an obscure, formidable beast. And there is also Jake’s past, hidden thousands of miles away and years ago, held in the silences about her family and the scars that stripe her back—a past that threatens to break into the present. With exceptional artistry and empathy, All the Birds, Singing reveals an isolated life in all its struggles and stubborn hopes, unexpected beauty, and hard-won redemption. This eBook edition includes a Reading Group Guide.

Bewilderment
Bewilderment

Author: David Ferry

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2012-09-14

Total Pages: 129

ISBN-13: 0226244881

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Winner of the 2012 National Book Award for Poetry. To read David Ferry’s Bewilderment is to be reminded that poetry of the highest order can be made by the subtlest of means. The passionate nature and originality of Ferry’s prosodic daring works astonishing transformations that take your breath away. In poem after poem, his diction modulates beautifully between plainspoken high eloquence and colloquial vigor, making his distinctive speech one of the most interesting and ravishing achievements of the past half century. Ferry has fully realized both the potential for vocal expressiveness in his phrasing and the way his phrasing plays against—and with—his genius for metrical variation. His vocal phrasing thus becomes an amazingly flexible instrument of psychological and spiritual inquiry. Most poets write inside a very narrow range of experience and feeling, whether in free or metered verse. But Ferry’s use of meter tends to enhance the colloquial nature of his writing, while giving him access to an immense variety of feeling. Sometimes that feeling is so powerful it’s like witnessing a volcanologist taking measurements in the midst of an eruption. Ferry’s translations, meanwhile, are amazingly acclimated English poems. Once his voice takes hold of them they are as bred in the bone as all his other work. And the translations in this book are vitally related to the original poems around them. From Bewilderment: October The day was hot, and entirely breathless, so The remarkably quiet remarkably steady leaf fall Seemed as if it had no cause at all. The ticking sound of falling leaves was like The ticking sound of gentle rainfall as They gently fell on leaves already fallen, Or as, when as they passed them in their falling, Now and again it happened that one of them touched One or another leaf as yet not falling, Still clinging to the idea of being summer: As if the leaves that were falling, but not the day, Had read, and understood, the calendar.

Love Is for the Birds
Love Is for the Birds

Author: Diane Owens Prettyman

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2024-10-08

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 1647427800

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

For fans of Mary Alice Monroe’s The Beach House comes a heartwarming story from women’s fiction author Diane Owens Prettyman about second chances as two people find a pathway out of their grief—directly in the aftermath of a hurricane. The Texas Gulf: beautiful yet unpredictable. A beach town destroyed. Her mother’s candy store swept away. This is what Teddy Wainsworth faces when she returns to Bird Isle. Meanwhile, Jack Shaughness, owner of a popular barbecue restaurant chain and widower still grieving the death of his wife, receives permission to cross over to the island with a smoker full of brisket to feed hurricane survivors. Soon after arriving, he meets Teddy and immediately finds himself drawn to her—which makes him feel he is betraying his wife. When the two find a lost dog, Jack convinces Teddy to take it home while they attempt to find the owner, creating a bond that brings them closer. In the wake of the hurricane, Bird Isle residents fear the Aransas Wildlife Refuge will not be ready for the whooping cranes’ annual migration south. Seeing that Jack has important connections and a love for the island, they enlist him to help restore the habitat of the endangered cranes before they fly to Padre Island for the winter. With their rescued dog always nearby, Teddy and Jack work side by side to rebuild Bird Isle for the return of the whooping cranes. But Jack is harboring a secret that may ruin everything he and Teddy are creating—and he won’t be able to keep that secret forever.

Early Bird
Early Bird

Author: Toni Yuly

Publisher: Macmillan

Published: 2014-01-28

Total Pages: 42

ISBN-13: 1250043271

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Early bird wakes up and begins a search for breakfast.

These Hands of Myrrh
These Hands of Myrrh

Author: Scott Ferry

Publisher: Kelsay Books

Published: 2021-08-20

Total Pages: 58

ISBN-13: 9781954353909

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This beautiful book by Scott Ferry is filled with ghostly plainsongs sung between fathers and daughters and sons (and who isn't one of these) as they evolve toward and eventually away from one another. There is an urgency here to harvest-before it's too late-that love particular to parents that rewrites itself in the palimpsest of a child. This is a book about sacred relationships and the power of tenderness. The poems in These Hands of Myrrh are ricochets from the front line born out of courage in the face of mortality. They have traveled through hard-earned wisdom to get to us. And as readers we can be thankful they arrived. -Gary Lemons, author of The Snake Quartet This collection immerses you gently, gradually, into a world where the mundane and the miraculous live side by side. Ferry shows us life and death, both the big moments (the birth of his son, the death of a neighbor, confronting alcoholism), as well as the small (gardening, a flight of birds, cleaning the fish tank). Before you know it, you are down in the underworld with him. Somehow, reality has shifted: ghosts communicate through streetlights. Trees have auras. The relationships between fathers and sons takes on a mythic quality. These poems are sharp, incisive, yet lyrical, often funny. Like all spiritual journeys, this book feels sometimes elemental and sometimes frightening, but always ends on a note of hope. -Lauren Scharhag, author of Languages, First and Last Don't let Scott Ferry's poems fool you and don't fail to let them captivate you. Their seemingly fragile beauty belies the tensile strength of a healer. They illustrate with precision the perspective of one who faces life and death on a daily basis, not losing either his grief over the inevitability of the former or the wonder and fleeting joy of the latter. Author Christopher Moore writes that children see magic because they never stop seeking it. Neither does Ferry. He illustrates a stippled landscape with flashes of gentle humor and softly graded shadows-repeated small touches, expertly placed, telling in the thought and affect they provoke in the reader. These poems linger long after reading them-for good reason. -Jonathan Yungkans, author of Beneath a Glazed Shadow